1st grade winter birch trees

1st grade winter birch trees

On the first day I showed students photos of birch trees in the winter. We then took small squares of cardboard and dipped them into black paint and scraped trees onto a 12" x 18" white drawing paper.
I have sponges soaked in paint for students to use for various projects such as printing. They come in handy. Remind students to gentle push them onto the sponge. Some students are rough with the cardboard and then they get bent and harder to work with it. This only took ten minutes. 

 Students then took a 6" x 18" piece of newsprint and trimmed the top to look like land. I taped the sides down for them to protect the bottom of their paper for when they started coloring with the oil pastels. This is to keep the ground clean.

I had them come to my desk when they were ready to have their papers taped. It saved a lot of time having the tape already torn!. 

Students could use either warm colored oil pastels or warm colored oil pastels to color the sky. I had them make smudgers with paper towels.

This took around 25-30 minutes. If students had time they could cut their birch trees and assemble them onto their ground (or do it the next class period). We tried using glue sticks at first but we found they didn't stick very well to the oil pastels, so we ended up using Elmer's school glue.   We reviewed background, foreground and middle ground and how to make the trees into an interesting arrangement. 

The last step was to add snow with a q-tip dipped into white paint. 

I probably could have had them add shadows, but I was afraid they might mess them up at this grade level.